A/N Hello everyone! I did not fall off the face of the planet, but my muse did take a 6 month walk about without any kind of warning :/ BUT! I have been writing a lot lately and working on some new stuff for you guys so hopefully I'm back now. This particular story has been sitting on my hard drive for a long time unposted, but since it's my birthday today :D I wanted to give you guys a birthday present from me and this chapter was sitting all ready to go, so I hope you enjoy it!

I also have to give a huge shout out to Alexandra926 for being the best beta and cheerleader ever and wrangling all my tense shift and reminding me commas are a thing :P

"Please tell me that's your banana bread."

Darcy looked up from the stainless steel mixing bowl tucked against her body, spotting her favorite super soldier standing in the doorway to the common room kitchen. "Steve!" she exclaimed, a bright grin splitting her face. "Well, what'll you give me if it is?"

Heading in her direction, he tapped his chin mockingly as he pretended to think about it. "My undying love and affection?"

"I thought I already had that," she teased her boyfriend of almost six months.

"You're not wrong," he agreed, as he leaned in to give her a proper hello.

"When did you get home?" she asked, pulling away slightly. "I thought you wouldn't be back until the end of the week."

"Finished the mission early and we touched down about 20 minutes ago," Steve explained, still holding her tight. "I took a quick shower and was going to forage for food, and then I was going to go looking for you and try to surprise my girl."

"Mission accomplished, consider me surprised. Lucky you, you got two for one," she said lifting her face to ask for another kiss, a request which he was more than happy to oblige.

"Mmmm, I missed you," he hummed against her lips, even as his stomach audibly growled.

"I missed you too and there's leftover Thai in there from last night that I don't think anyone has gotten to yet," she advised with a laugh as his belly continued to gurgle. "And, for your information, this will be my banana bread if you can wait another hour."

"For that, I'd wait all day," he grinned, rummaging through the fridge before popping the leftover containers into the microwave.

Darcy couldn't help but smile back before her curiosity got the best of her. "So who's the other part of we?" she asked, one eyebrow quirked. In the nine months that she'd lived in the tower following that whole Dark Elves mess in London, she'd gotten to know all the usual suspects, and she'd seen everyone in the past week and a half that Steve had been off on a mission for SHIELD.

"Natasha," Steve answered, pulling his food out of the microwave and taking it to sit at the bar so he could continue to talk to her while he ate and she baked. "Fury gave us both some downtime and she decided to come back with me, to see for herself what Tony was working on for her."

"Ah, the infamous Black Widow," Darcy said lightly, hiding the fact that she felt like she'd been sucker punched in the stomach. "Once I meet her I'll have collected the whole Avengers set."

"I always forget that you haven't met Nat yet."

"Nope," she said, popping the P, finishing mixing her bread with more force than was strictly necessary. "Not yet."

Tony was living in the Tower full-time since he hadn't rebuilt his Malibu home yet, and Bruce had become basically a permanent fixture as well, having found his Science Squad in Tony and Jane. And, of course, where Jane went, Thor was sure to follow whenever he was on world. Steve had only been an infrequent visitor until they had started dating, but now he was staying in the suite that Tony had designed for him almost exclusively unless he was out on a mission. Clint tended to pop in and out at totally random times, but as of yet there had been no sightings of the only representative for Team Estrogen. And the one time the Black Widow had apparently visited the Tower, she and Jane had been on a two week trip to an observatory upstate.

"Well, you probably will soon," he said, between bites of pad thai. "She mentioned that she was hungry when we were flying in, so she should be making her way down here any minute. I know she wants to meet you. I've told her all about you."

"Great!" If her smile was forced, Steve didn't comment. "I need chocolate chips."

She was halfway into the pantry when Steve spoke again. "There you are. We were just talking about you. Nat, this is Darcy Lewis; Darce, this is Natasha Romanoff."

Darcy spun around to see the red-headed assassin standing only ten feet behind her. Startled, she pulled the sides of the bag of apart sending the dark chocolate morsels in every direction.

"Damn it!" Darcy dropped to her knees to try to clean up the mess, and ever the gentleman, Steve rounded the island to help.

When JARVIS deployed the vacuum-bots, the pair abandoned their clean-up attempt and looked up to see that the Black Widow was nowhere to be found.

Darcy covered her face with her flour and chocolate-covered hands and sighed. That was not how she wanted that meeting to go.

xXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

A week later, seven of the longest days of her life, and Darcy still had not officially met Natasha Romanoff. And quite frankly, she was starting to crack under the pressure. She wasn't sleeping well and had become jumpy and irritable. The people closest to her were starting to take note of her unusual behavior.

Natasha was still in the Tower, Darcy knew that much. Just that morning over coffee Jane had mentioned that she had met the spysassin and that she had asked about Darcy. But when she pressed the subject, Jane confessed that she had been preoccupied with a new experiment that she was planning and couldn't quite remember what she had told Natasha about her assistant.

And her anxiety was not improved by the fact that Darcy constantly felt like she was being watched when she was out in the tower's public spaces. She tried to go on like it was any other week, but whether she was cooking in the common kitchen with Thor as her official taster, watching a movie with Steve, trying to coax Tony into eating something other than one of his smoothies, or doing yoga with Bruce, she couldn't shake the feeling of eyes on the back of her neck. It didn't help that sometimes when she looked over her shoulder, she could swear she saw a flash of red hair disappearing around a corner.

She knew she had to do something about her stress levels before she lost the plot completely. It was well after normal business hours, but that didn't mean much to Team Science. However, she was in desperate need of me time, so after making sure that none of her scientists were doing anything that had the potential to blow up the tower, open a rift in the space time continuum, or start World War III, she told them all she was taking off for the night, encouraged them to do the same, before making her way down to the gym.

Changing in the locker room, she headed into the seldom used dance studio. She didn't know who Tony had in mind when he included this room within the fully-equipped gym. Maybe he was just being thorough; but whatever the reason, she was grateful. It was her little secret getaway since none of the other Avengers or Avenger-adjacent residents of the Tower ever seemed to use the room.

After stretching and the rudimentary warm-ups, she laced up her toe shoes, asked JARVIS for some appropriate music and let herself get lost in the dance.

She loved ballet, had always taken class for as far back as she could remember. Her father had told her on more than one occasion that it was in her blood. That her mother had been an extraordinary ballerina who could have danced with the Bolshoi, and Darcy had wanted to live up to that legacy. But even though her father always found a class for her if they stayed in one place long enough, they had moved around too much for her to establish herself in a company. That, added to the fact that once puberty set in, and Darcy had to accept that she would never have the 'ideal' dancers body, meant that it never had never gone beyond a hobby, but that didn't lessen her love for the dance one bit.

"Watch the extension of your left hand on your jetés. It's bending at the wrist."

And in that moment, Darcy realized who Tony had created the studio for. It was so obvious that she was actually offended by herself for not having realized it before. As she turned to face the other woman, she was really grateful she hadn't been en pointe when she was interrupted, since breaking an ankle really wasn't on her list of things to do today.

"I'll keep that in mind," she said, keeping her face blank, even though she wanted to throw up on the floor.

Natasha didn't say anything for a long time, but Darcy knew what she was trying to accomplish with her silence and held fast, steadily meeting her gaze, refusing to break and speak first. This was the path that she had set them on when she had agreed to move into the Tower. She would see it through.

The slight narrowing of her eyes was the only warning that the Black Widow was about to speak. "Darya." It was one word, short and with a bite.

Darcy nodded hard, once. "JARVIS, be a bro and engage privacy mode. And shut off the music." She knew that the coming conversation wasn't one either of them would want on record.

"Of course Ms. Lewis," JARVIS answered.

"I was wondering if and/or when you would realize," Darcy said softly, once JARVIS had fulfilled Darcy's requests.

"What are you doing here?" Natasha questioned.

"Here in the studio or here in the Tower?" Darcy replied.

"In the Tower."

"Oh good, because I thought the other one was pretty obvious," Darcy said, her sass a defense mechanism against her nerves. "Although that one is pretty obvious too. I work here. And, ya know, live here."

Natasha pulled a folder with the distinctive stylized eagle printed on the cover out from under her arm.

"You pulled my SHIELD file." It was a statement, not a question. Darcy wasn't even surprised. "What did you think?"

"It's very thorough," Natasha admitted, as she flipped through it. "Didn't raise any red flags. Darcy Maria Lewis, age twenty-six, born and raised just outside of Victoria, British Columbia." She looked up from the folder and arched an eyebrow. "Canadian? Really?"

Darcy just shrugged.

"Child of Gerald and Renee Lewis. Gerald was a freelance ghostwriter and Renee gave music lessons, both worked from home, both were adopted only-children, both sets of grandparents deceased before you were born. That's smart," she conceded looking up at Darcy again. "Limits the family history and possible acquaintances to be tracked down and questioned."

"I still went back and added three generations of history on the adoptive families after everything went down in New Mexico," Darcy admitted freely. "I didn't think I would be worth the time for SHIELD to dig back that far, but I figured better to be safe than sorry."

Natasha didn't comment, but went back to reading Darcy's file. "Parents passed in a car accident when you were nineteen but you had already received a full ride to Culver University and enough life insurance to see your living expenses through college."

Darcy stood silently, waiting for her to get to the point.

"And then when you needed six science credits to graduate, you just happened to be the only applicant for an internship that just happened to put you at ground zero for Thor's first contact and set you on a path to be here. Living in Stark Tower with total access to the Avengers, completely overlooked as any kind of threat."

"You think I'm a plant." Again, it was a statement.

"Wouldn't you?"

"You think that they sent me here," Darcy continued, her stomach churning. "But to do what? Send back information? Be a sleeper? To get to you?"

"The idea did occur to me."

"Okay, I could see why you would think that," Darcy conceded. "That is just sick enough that they would enjoy that. It's partially why I let you come to me. I was more than a little tempted to seek you out, but I was afraid you might shoot first, ask questions later. But I swear it's not true!" she promised emphatically. "Plus I think if this was just a long game of theirs, there would have just been way too many variables to believe it would all shake out this way. I mean, even if they did think Jane was worth watching, no one could have predicted Thor."

Natasha wasn't swayed and leveled Darcy with a look that had sent hardened killers to their knees.

"Me ending up here…" Darcy trailed off as she tried to find the words that could make Natasha believe her. "I would call it fate if I believed in such a thing. But I don't, so I guess it's just a crazy random happenstance. To be honest, I had fully planned on ditching Darcy Lewis at the end of that internship. I was thinking about moving to California for a while, learning how to surf. But then Thor happened, and SHIELD got involved, and suddenly I was a person of interest and I thought it was too dangerous for Darcy to disappear. I admit, after shit went down in London, I pushed Jane into accepting Stark's offer to move into the Tower, and that was mainly because of you."

"For me?" Natasha's expression was softening, but her body was still tense, ready to strike at any moment if need be.

"Mm-hmm," Darcy confirmed. "It was after the Battle of New York when I first started to think that maybe it was possible. Any footage of you that SHIELD didn't immediately wipe from the internet was grainy and far away, and my memories of you are fuzzier than I wish they were, but they called you the Black Widow, and that was too much for me to ignore. And then, when Thor came back to stay with us while we were in London, he was telling us about the other Avengers and he said you called yourself Natasha Romanoff and told us more about you. Then, I really started to believe that you might be, well, you."

Her voice climbed and her words spilled from her lips faster and faster as she tried and failed to keep her emotions from getting the best of her. "And so, when we moved into the Tower I kept telling myself not to get my hopes up, because I didn't even know if you were still alive or if you really had defected. But I really wanted it to be you. And I've been living here for nine months and I was starting to lose hope that we would ever be in the Tower at the same time. And then, you were suddenly in the kitchen looking just like I remembered, and you were there and then you were gone again. And I didn't know if you would recognize me, or even remember me and I've been alone for so long. I was only fourteen when they came for Papa, and I've been on my own ever since. I've been alone for so long."

Tears were freely streaming down Darcy's face, and while her training demanded continued caution, her heart couldn't stand it a moment longer, and for the first time in a very, very long time, Natasha allowed her heart to guide her and before she realized she was moving, she had the younger woman cradled in her arms.

"I'm so sorry moy rebenok devochka. I'm so sorry. I'm here now, you're not alone anymore." Natasha continued to murmur comforting words, sometimes in English, sometimes in Russian, as they both sank to the floor.

"Mama," Darcy sobbed into her shoulder, being held by her mother for the first time since she was six years old.

And if Natasha let a few tears of her own sink into Darcy's hair, well, nobody had to know.

A/N soooooo what do you guys think? want to see more of this story? give me a birthday present in return and let me know! :D